The truth about how the Home Office views Islamic extremism - by Theresa May’s
former speech-writer

David Cameron was extremely angry that the Coalition’s final legislative programme before next year’s general election was pushed from the top of the news agenda last week by “May vs Gove”.

Despite the very public split between Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, at the level of policy, their differences on how best to deal with Islamic extremism are more about emphasis and nuance than radically different approaches.

Beyond last week’s stories about leaked letters and statements from the ministers’ supporters is a profoundly serious argument about what must be done in order to ensure that Muslim communities in Britain adopt British values, and are integrated into British society.

It is not just an argument about how to prevent terrorism inspired by religious fanaticism. It is also about the future of our culture, and how to ensure that it does not fragment into a series of segregated and separate groups united only by their mutual suspicion and distrust.

That is the nightmare scenario that just about everyone wants to avoid. It is one conjured up as a serious possibility not just by political parties such as Ukip and pressure groups such as Migration Watch, but also by academic researchers who study the impact of immigration.

Both Conservative ministers agree that things went badly wrong during the Blair years – and, indeed, before that. In the Nineties, the Security Service was preoccupied with defeating the IRA. Terrorism inspired by Islamic extremism did not seem to be a serious threat to Britain. MI5 and the Home Office converged on a policy of leaving alone religious fanatics who took refuge in London; as long as they did not plant bombs in Britain, they could safely be ignored. Their quarrels were with other countries. MI5’s scarce resources had to be targeted at individuals and movements that were a direct threat to Britain. The consensus at the time was that Muslim extremists were not in that category.

The French security services derided that policy as criminally short-sighted and coined the term “Londonistan”, suggesting that the effect of that policy was to turn London into a haven for Islamic and other terrorists who would, sooner or later, strike against Britain.

There were officials within the British intelligence and security services who felt the same way as the French. But those voices “lost the argument” – at least when it came to resources. The advocates of the narrow concentration on terrorists insisted that “we can only beat back the crocodiles who come close to the boat”. Those who disagreed felt that, in the long term, the only way to deal with the crocodiles was to drain the swamp – and that meant, they said, targeting extremist ideology.

The argument between Mr Gove and Mrs May – which resurrected talk about “beating back the crocodiles” and “draining the swamp” – is a continuation of that long-standing debate.

Michael Gove thinks that extremism, particularly Islamic extremism, is an ideology that sustains terrorism and needs to be combated as such. It is true that most Islamic extremists are not terrorists. But that truth, his supporters say, does not invalidate the connection between the two. Religious extremism is necessary for Islamic terrorism: if there were no Islamic extremism, there would be no Islamic terrorism.

Against this, Mrs May’s supporters argue that targeting people’s religious beliefs when they are not advocating terrorism goes against the fundamental British value of toleration. It is also counterproductive: you cannot hope to inspire people to become tolerant by treating them intolerantly.

Furthermore, it is impractical: on what basis can you intervene against a group if that group is not actively advocating violence? That they have failed to adopt British values fast enough is certainly not a good enough reason. If it were, we should have to start intervening in the Hassidic Jewish community, which guards its separate culture as effectively and completely as any fundamentalist Muslim sect. But no one thinks Hassidic Jews should be pressurised to abandon their separate culture and identity in order to become “British”.

The debate on how best to ensure that religious extremism does not generate terrorism takes place in the context of another one: how to integrate immigrants into British society, and to ensure that they adopt values that are not actively hostile to the central ideals of our society – secular democracy, freedom of conscience, tolerance and the equality of everyone before the law.

The number of immigrants coming to this country increased enormously when Tony Blair relaxed the rules restricting entry. Many of the new immigrants were from Pakistan and Bangladesh. They went to the communities in Britain that had been settled and shaped by people who came from the same area, sometimes even the same village, as they did.

It is perfectly reasonable that immigrants, arriving in a strange land whose values and even language they do not fully understand, should prefer to be with people who are similar to them and who share their own language and values. But the effect of that preference is to create “diaspora” communities that do not integrate or adapt to the values of the new society.

Sir Paul Collier, a professor of development economics at Oxford University, has produced a model that shows that it inevitably becomes a self-reinforcing process: each diaspora community gets ever more entrenched in reproducing the values of the society from which the migrants to it come, which in turn attracts more migrants from that society to it, which then ensures that it is less integrated with the host society – and more attractive to the immigrants from the traditional society in Pakistan, India or wherever.

Professor Collier thinks that unless the state takes very definite steps to stop this process happening, it will continue more or less indefinitely, with the result that migrant communities become ever more alienated and remote from the society to which they are supposed to adapt.

That leads directly to the nightmare scenario: a Britain made up of mutually antagonistic “monocultures” that do not trust each other, do not work together and do not share the values of secular democracy, freedom of conscience and the equality of both sexes before the law.

State policy in Britain over the last two decades has fostered the formation of unintegrated diaspora communities: multiculturalism, which was for many years the dominant approach, encouraged communities to hold on to their own values – with the inevitable result that they have become more entrenched.

White racism is not the biggest obstacle to integration: the highest levels of segregation anywhere in Britain are those recorded between Indians and Pakistanis in towns in the north of England. The segregation between

African-Caribbeans and Asians is markedly higher than the degree of segregation between whites and African-Caribbeans. And it seems to be getting worse, not better. Immigrant communities are getting more isolated, less integrated and more locked into their own traditional values.

What can be done to reverse this depressing trend? The Home Office nurtures the hope that integration is going to happen naturally without any active intervention from the Government. The children of migrants, or their children’s children, will come to realise that our way of life – based around freedom of choice and material prosperity – is better than the poverty, bigotry and intolerance that characterise religious extremism. But officials at the Home Office insist that immigrants can only come to that conclusion by themselves. The state cannot force them to it, and if the state tries, it will only produce results opposite to the ones intended.

At Michael Gove’s Department for Education, there is a more pessimistic conviction, that if we do not intervene to stop religious extremism, it will flourish and create communities that reproduce values utterly inimical to British ideas of toleration and individual freedom. Mr Gove’s supporters note that radically conservative Muslims already see themselves as locked in a battle with secular culture, one they have to win if their own religion is not to wither away. The allegations about a “Trojan horse” plot in Birmingham by Islamic extremists to take over schools so as to make them more “Islamic” are simply an attempt to insulate their children against the “corrupting” effects of British society – which they see as characterised by not much more than sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

After last night’s resignation of Mrs May’s special adviser and Mr Gove’s apology to the Prime Minister, the spat between the two departments may blow over in time. But the argument that underlies it certainly will not.

It is of critical significance to all our futures: what kind of society the next generation will inherit depends on who is right – and who wins the battle in Cabinet and in Parliament.